


Monsters and Memory

by flecksofpoppy



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon - Original Game, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Exploration, Gen, Gen Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 06:32:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7628722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/pseuds/flecksofpoppy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monsters and humans share a kinship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters and Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Corrosion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corrosion/gifts).



> This was written for the FF7 Fanworks Exchange 2016! Prompt was: "Given all the weird monsters in FFVII I can't believe that AVALANCHE take it all in stride. So, I want to see what their reactions to some of the more bizarre ones."
> 
> Hope you like it, Corrosion!! <3

Lately, there’s a memory that’s been gnawing on Cloud’s mind as readily as the Geostigma on his arm—a description that he heard long ago, right as AVALANCHE was in its second infancy, with an unlikely cast of characters gotten from a host of strange places.

That first showdown on the roof of the Shinra building, when Rufus Shinra had first faced them as a group and asked who they all were, upon hearing the responses, had simply said, “What a crew.” Other ways of putting this: a rag-tag bunch, a pantomime of a terrorist group, a gathering of misfits.

In the mélange of memory that still can sometimes swirl rather than appear as a linear series, that has always stood out. Maybe it’s because it was the first time he had ever been part of a “rag-tag” bunch, always feeling like an outsider, never part of the group. Even before he regained his memories, he knew the role of a leftover outsider better than even how to wield a sword. 

Maybe it stands out now since it was the moment that they left the lower plate—some of them for the first time, some of them for the first time with others—when they become something other than have-nots stuck in the cog of the machine. Simple as it was, there was something to be said for simply seeing the world beyond destruction, darkness, and death—the plains and deserts of the Planet, all of which, in the long run, was exactly what they fought to protect.

Having a cause is powerful, but now, there are many people with causes; there are the politics of rebuilding and the squabbles over who to put in charge and how to deal with the practical day-to-day parts of life that can’t be solved with a rare summon or a sword.

As Geostigma—what they were calling Midgar Disease—leaves people dead in the street, left to rot and ignored, avoided, stepped around like refuse, he can’t help but think back on the lower sectors of Midgar. How there too, indifference is the only way to survive when misery becomes too massive—people dying in pipes of Mako poisoning and criminal kingpins exploiting the poor.

Of course, life is indeed different now; but sometimes, Cloud will ride across the plains outside Midgar just to experience the wind at his back. Tifa thinks he’s brooding, but really, he’s nostalgic for when the world seemed new for just a moment. 

Cloud thinks that Tifa climbs up on the roof sometimes to look at the stars by herself for longer than any person could possibly find much interest in the sky for the same reason he rides his bike. Although he never considered himself a nostalgic person, he also didn’t realize exactly how much he didn’t remember in the first place.

The monsters of the Planet are as far and vast as the world itself, and when lost wanderers become travelers with a destination, things change. He has time to ponder the past more now, consider those who have become friends, and wonder what monsters are made of for them.

* * *

**Aeris**

On the beaches of Wutai, Aeris unexpectedly finds a memory.

As a girl, Aeris only ever knew three things of value: the ability to grow flowers without sunlight, a protective bangle, and a guard rod to protect herself. Everyone in Sector 5 had to be at least a little handy with a weapon, and with Elmyra’s help and putting a little gil aside, she managed to procure these two items from Wall Market. 

Fine things never interested her. Despite the interested glances from men she received as she grew older which were followed with offers of a better life, a better job, or expensive gifts from white collar Shinra paper pushers “slumming it,” intended as a wordless transaction for what they wanted, she shunned it all.

Things of value—particularly monetary or social value—only meant trouble. Much to her chagrin, though, trouble seemed to follow her no matter what she did.

She met the most dangerous man in Midgar when she was ten, who told her that the things inside her head were normal, even though she denied hearing them. Tseng of the Turks was always more interested in Aeris than any man she’d ever met, for reasons she knew were nefarious, but he never offered her gifts. 

That changed when she was seventeen, and upon making his typical monthly stop at the Gainsborough household—much to Elmyra’s disdain, though there wasn’t anything she could really do about it—he found Aeris holed up in bed. 

Her lip had been cut and her eye blackened, but she had won the fight with the mugger who had tried to hold her up on her way home the night before for the gil she’d earned.

“There are better ways to defend yourself,” he’d said simply, cold and unsympathetic and he usually was, but there was something else now—an emotion hanging between them that was more dangerous than predator and prey. 

“You’re not from Midgar,” she’d said one night when he had yet again inserted his presence into her and Elmyra’s home. At this point, it had become routine; they all knew there would probably come a day when Tseng wouldn’t arrive to simply keep an eye on her, but also to take her finally.

They had been sitting in the garden, since Aeris had no better suggestion than to simply make Tseng leave. She never knew how long he’d stay, or why, or when; at that point, she’d grown used to it, though.

“No,” he’d answered simply, crossing his arms and leaning against a tree. “Wutai.”

Aeris accepted her first gift at eighteen, and it was from Tseng—a bangle made of something called Adaman that was a far finer type of armor than anything she’d ever seen. 

He told her that they came from the shores of where he was from, where giant turtles laid eggs in the sand, and the ocean roared. This is a fantastic creature, an Adamantaimai that she’s only heard near fairytales about, a giant beast with a shell.

When she walks the shores of Wutai with Cloud, and sees one for the first time, she doesn’t need to ask what it is. It looks like something from a nightmarish fairytale, and although somewhere in the back of her mind she does take a moment to marvel at its sheer colossal dazzle, she doesn’t hesitate in battle.

Even when she’s traveled far past Wutai, and found superior arms and armor, she never leaves behind the ones she left Midgar with.

* * *

**Tifa**

In a sea of silty marshlands, Tifa discovers how to capture fire.

When Tifa had first ended up in Midgar, it’d taken some time to get used to living in the lower sectors. Morning was defined by a tiny ray of light that had managed to filter through some crag in the metal layer cake of Midgar, reflected off a billboard, bent into her room above the Seventh Heaven bar she shared with Jessie.

Jessie was the first friend Tifa had made since leaving Nibelheim. While she’d considered Barret a friend, he was also the leader of the group, and that made things a bit different.

Jessie showed her the ropes, how to survive in the city, what places to avoid and how to fight dirty if need be. She told stories about growing up in a mechanical shop in the sector slums her father owned, how she’d honed her natural ability to create explosives and other devices early, how she’d simply had “a knack for it.” 

She’d sacrificed herself in the name of their cause; but too many things had already been destroyed by fire in Tifa’s past, and this one was threatening to put her over the edge.

It was right after they’d left the dark twist of metal and blood behind and fled outside the city limits that Tifa had felt sunlight on her in the first time in a long time, and that she’d also fought not to cry.

Barret noticed; brusque as he is, he was always good at that.

A few nights later at an inn, he’d slid something across the table to her—a piece of materia she didn’t recognize.

“Found it in that psycho’s lab,” he explained. “Think it can catch fire.” He’d cleared his throat as Tifa’s had tightened, and they’d just sat in reverent silence for a moment, a few beats of stillness for their dead friends.

“I think she woulda liked that,” he’d finally said softly. “They all woulda.” 

The Enemy Skill materia ends up being relatively rare, and it’s during their first encounter with a giant snake that Tifa learns its power.

The marshes stink of salt and swampy water as they try to run through to get to the other side, and true to the rumors, a giant serpent rises out of the marsh.

She’s not sure how they kill it—if it’s Cloud’s desperation, Barret’s fire power, or her own blind determination—but they do. And when the snake casts a type of fire magic that comes in a sheer blast of natural elemental magic unlike any type of spell materia can create, Tifa feels the heat shoot into her veins, up from her gloves where the materia is slotted in.

After the Zolom, Tifa vows to collect a bestiary of monsters that Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge never got to see—a collection of outlandish spells gathered with her fists and in her fight.

For them, she will hold the violent magic of the strangest monsters.

* * *

**Barret**

In the deserts around the ruins of his hometown, Barret learns that fortune is as fickle and fleeting as the appearance of a tiny monster with a lot to lose.

Wealth is hard to come by in a mining town if you’re doing the actual mining, where looking for items of value is a process of going deeper underground into the dark than rising up into the light. The irony of it was not lost on Barret as a young man, and certainly not on Dyne.

Before Shinra came, when Barret was still married and Dyne had his family, there were always stories of ways to get rich quick out in the desert. These stories varied from being about bizarre, rare creatures who hoarded gold to the tale that was obviously a tall one about a man who had stumbled upon a cactus one day, stubbed his toe, and then somehow become rich.

Barret was never one for flights of fancy, though, and he invested his faith in the reactor Shinra proposed to build and their promises of prosperity. He learned that faith—even when based on facts—is as unreliable as fortune.

The way that coins fall out of pockets is the same way that people commit suicide or lose limbs—guileless and uncontrolled, a combination of carelessness and bad luck.

A man’s life can be ruined more than once, but it can also be remade; Dyne’s death kills something in Barret once and for all, but it also reminds that he traded in his hand for a gun long ago. His bullets aren’t accidental or lucky—there is no such thing as a lucky shot, just like gamblers rise and fall without their consent, praying for luck.

When Cactuers drop enough gil to feed the population of Corel Prison for a month, Barret doesn’t sum it up to luck; he simply knows now that he’s a good shot.

* * *

**Cloud**

In a mansion Cloud only remembers vaguely from a murky childhood, he finds a real memory.

The Shinra Mansion is a house of horrors yet strangely magnetic—a grandiose dwelling that no one in a town like Nibelheim could ever afford to own. However, rumors of what goes on within its walls keeps most of the townspeople away.

The mansion is just a stop along their way to other destinations, and Cloud has seen many monsters with multiple faces and parts, bits and pieces of matter reassembled. But in the fight with a monster made of different parts, he suddenly remembers being behind glass, existing in a tube where the world existed only in whispers and screams and speech he still can’t remember.

And when he couldn’t remember his own name, he still remembers what it’s like to be a monster with two faces, unsure of the present, just another Lost Number.

* * *

And here is Cloud now—the hero who saved the Planet, witness to some of the most ferocious beasts in both human and animal form the world has suffered.

He wonders now when monsters became unremarkable and unsurprising; when even the strangest and most dangerous beasts no longer impress him. 

But given that so many monsters now live in his memory, he is satisfied with the wind at his back and his motley crew.


End file.
